Some Vacations Don’t Need an Airport

Hallelujah! The trip through security was much easier than I was anticipating and excitement started churning in my stomach. I have always loved coming to the airport, and knowing that my family was soon going to be flying on one of those beautiful machines had me all but jumping up and down in excitement. We get to our concourse and I suddenly realize that we’ve got about an hour and a half to kill and I’ve got a nine year old serial shopper with serious vacation savings in his hot little hands. After repeatedly letting the little consumer know that “no, you can’t buy another stuffed animal to bring on the plane,” we decided to spend our quality family time in the next longest line of the day—that of the breakfast bagels.

Clearly we weren’t thinking too straight, but experience had taught us that if we didn’t grab something to eat on the plane we were likely to starve. I mean, I know that most airlines will sell you party snacks and things like that, but unless you’re a person that enjoys being dehydrated (yet bloated at the same time) because of all of the salt, it’s likely you’re not going to like what they’re selling. So we (sort of) patiently waited to make put in our order when I felt myself beginning to be seduced by the grab and go section of the store.

Now, usually if I find myself in this kind of predicament it is over some sort of chocolate, cheese or hamburgers, but this time I began lusting over a salad. A beautiful bed of lettuce with thick chunks of chicken, beautifully sliced strawberries, a wonderful looking vinaigrette…Wait, where was I? Ahem. It was a very nice looking salad and I wanted it. No guilt, right? No worries—a great meal to take on the plane, but…it’s a salad. I can barely afford a good salad on a regular day and now I was lusting after something while trapped in a world of seriously inflated food stuffs. Didn’t matter. I had to have it, so I dipped into my life savings to pay for it, wrapped it up tightly and shoved it into my backpack.

Finding a relatively quiet area of the airport to eat our breakfast, we found ourselves with about thirty minutes left before it was time to board our flight. The boy and I decided to take a quick loop around the concourse to keep the blood flowing to our lower limbs when we passed the Departure flight board. I already knew every detail of our trip down to the last second, but I can never seem to pass up anything that has a lot of writing on it. Since we were going to be taking the seriously super cheap way to Hawaii (which apparently means lots of layovers) and we were going to be flying to Seattle first I instinctively looked at the board to reassure myself that everything was on schedule.

It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Our plane was delayed an hour. My purse started vibrating and I realized that I was being informed via text from the airline that we were going to be delayed an hour at the exact same time I was seeing it on the board. No. No, no, no, no, no! I truly do not have the personality to handle this kind of situation. I mean, there’s never been a bigger problem in the entire world, right?! What about our connection? What if we can’t get to Hawaii tonight? What if our plane was sucked into a time portal and all of the other planes in the world break down? I can’t be stuck at DIA for another hour! Crapola.

After double and triple checking with the airline, their website, and the Departure signs we realized that we were stuck in Denver for one more hour. No big deal. We can do this. So we grabbed all of our backpacks and walked around until we found a double plug—can’t go anywhere if we’re not plugged in, baby. I found a nice, not so dirty area of the floor to lay down and tried to take a little nap. As it got closer to our boarding time I realized that there still wasn’t a plane at our gate. Grrrrr. I sat up and stretched and instantly noticed that an airline employee was just about the make an announcement– and I knew what was coming. Damn it! I willed her to just go away—just turn around and go away and everything would be just fine. Ha!

The tinny voice began to speak. “We’re just looking at a slight delay. See, the crew that will be flying you to Seattle is still flying in from Salt Lake City and just as soon as they get here we will kick them in the ass, ply them with coffee, and force them to check the safety of the plane just quickly enough to not qualify it unsafe. We will then happily usher Rene’s family to the front of the line so that they can be seated first and we can truly assure the physical safety of all of our employees!” Delayed again. I think I turned into Anger. Or the Hulk. Or something equivalent. Now it was serious irritation and a growing fear that we were going to miss our connecting flight. This was not at all starting out as the relaxing vacation I had been dreaming of…